1. United States
2. Ohio
3. Letter

In his recent GOP convention speech, Trump reached a new level of grift, offering a 5,000 dollar payout to every adult citizen if Republicans keep control of Congress in November. He’s calling it the “Trump Dividend.” A payment like that requires congressional approval, which seems pretty unlikely when you do the math. Estimates put the cost at about 1.3 trillion dollars, which is roughly 70 percent of the entire discretionary federal budget. Chip Roy, a Republican congressman from Texas, said he’d like to know how anyone plans to pay for it. And Trump has done this before. Last November, he promised 2,000 dollar tariff checks by the middle of this year. But it’s September and those checks never went out. On Sean Hannity's show, JD Vance was asked whether the plan is an attempt to buy votes. Since it is clearly illegal, JD Vance walked that back by mentioning its a tariff rebate. But even before the Supreme Court struck down most of Trump’s tariffs in February, they brought in about 200 billion dollars a year. Now it’s a fraction of that. These checks will never go out, and Trump knows it. But just one more lie can’t hurt, right? He made an even bigger promise before the speech. Asked about the war with Iran, now in its seventh month, Trump told reporters it would end immediately after the election, and that oil prices would come tumbling down. Compare that with new reporting from the Wall Street Journal that Trump’s own top advisers, including Vance and Rubio, have warned him the war could last through the end of his term. These aren’t Trump critics. This is his own cabinet. So voters are being offered two things: a new check from a guy who never sent the last one, and an end to a war that the president’s own advisers don’t expect. In case you couldn’t tell, this is what desperation looks like.